The Phoenix Suns don’t look like a team on the rise. Mat Ishbia has repeatedly told us this team is ascending, but the Suns’ recent disaster against Portland suggests otherwise.
For starters, we are going to have some very uncomfortable conversations about Devin Booker this season if we see more performances like we saw on Wednesday. A -43 in the box score with no 3-point attempts from the best player on your team, who consistently struggled to create separation and did not look confident shooting the ball at all, is a losing formula for the Suns this season. The Booker decline over the last few seasons is hard to ignore, even though we have all done our best (myself included) to convince ourselves that it was mostly external factors.
Next up, we turn our attention to Dillon Brooks, Collin Gillespie, and Miles Bridges, three talented players who are obviously flawed and will likely not substantially improve for the rest of their careers. Brooks had a career year last season and may score a ton of points this year, but at what cost? He is not going to transform himself into a high-level playmaker or rebounding machine overnight. As for Bridges, the defensive lapses and fine rebounding stats were enough in Charlotte, but to expect any improvement from him as a shooter or defensive pest seven years into his NBA career seems to be wishful thinking at best. Gillespie is what he is at this point too: a lethal 3-point shooter and great backup point guard or capable starter. But it is unlikely he will become an elite player maker or an efficient three-level scorer for the rest of his career.
Are all of these good players who need more than a handful of preseason games to build continuity? Yes. Absolutely. I expect them to look much better playing together in December, but none are guys that any self-respecting NBA hoops fan would categorize as “ascending players.”
Now, let us look at the young guys… are Ryan Dunn and Rasheer Fleming ever going to be more than impactful defensive players off the bench? Dunn refuses to shoot 3s, and Rasheer Fleming shot a wide-open corner 3 off the top of the backboard against the Trailblazers. Meanwhile, Toumani Camara was lethal from the 3-point line and an unbelievably effective defender to twist the knife even deeper. If you expect either Dunn or Fleming to become starting-level 3-and-D prototypes, you assume that they’ll magically be blessed by the basketball gods and turn into Royce O’Neale-level snipers in a season or two. Which is more unlikely to happen since they have not shown much growth so far in their first few seasons in the NBA offensively.
Then there is Oso Ighodaro, a perfect backup big man in the NBA, with a high IQ and motor. He is perfectly functional as a defender and connector, but that is what he is. Ighodaro is likely a mostly finished product unless he becomes a capable 3-point shooter or elite finisher at the rim.
Koa Peat is definitely the wild card in this group because we have not seen enough from him yet to have any clue who he can be in the NBA. However, that shot gets more broken with every shot, and it’s hard to survive in the NBA if you look at how broken that shot is when shooting the ball.
Now to the guys who could be characterized as “ascending.”
The Suns’ two most likely players to ascend into something more than average NBA players are Jalen Green and Khaman Maluach. While there have been flashes of brilliance from both players, they also have gaping holes in their games that may prove to be their undoing.
As explosive and talented as Green is, his processing and vision are what hold him back. Against Portland, after coming off a screen and getting downhill against a Portland big, Green throws the ball back through his legs right into the trailing Portland defender for the easiest steal of the night. It was a play so out of the ordinary for an NBA player that it stuck with me for the rest of the night and is just one example of how far away he is from being a great player.
For Maluach, he has the size and the effort to be a great big in the NBA, but his inability to cleanly grab rebounds, run dribble handoffs, and locate his man on defense right now are giant red flags. The best argument I can come up with for his ascension is that he has not played enough basketball yet in his life, leaving him the most room to grow. But the Suns cannot afford to wait many more years for him to be ready; by the time he is ready, Booker, Brooks, and Bridges (who will likely sign an extension with the Suns, yay!) are going to be well past their primes.
Now this is clearly an overreaction one game into the regular season. But it is important to point out that while this team can be a really good basketball team this season, it is not an ascending team. The best players on this team are in their primes or past them. There are young players ascending into fine players, but who on the team outside of Booker has a chance to make an All-Star team in the future, given the trajectory they are on right now?
It is probably between Green and Maluach, but that is if everything goes right for them in their development over the next few seasons.
The Suns are an incrementally improving team; they are not an ascending team. And while the Suns are capable of being a mediocre to good team the next couple of seasons, the ceiling is not the roof for this team.
